Mothering Amid the Chaos

I have been wanting to write about what it is like to be a mom in post-Katrina New Orleans. There is a lot of talk about how few families have come back and how the city is not fit for little kids. A colleague of mine who had a baby two months after Katrina did not come back because she didn’t want her daughter exposed to the hazards here. I certainly understood her fears. I wasn’t sure myself that I wanted to bring my daughter back here. It is getting better, but I still worry sometimes about the long-term effects of growing up in a disaster zone.

Everyday as we drive past downtown on our way home, my daughter points out the “big white thing” and asks what it is. When I tell her, she invariably responds, “I love Superdomes!” Of course, the rest of us can never hear that word again without recalling the unspeakable suffering that occurred there. Her innocence of all things Katrina is both soothing and poignant. Thank God she has no idea what happened there. But one day she will.

I am eternally grateful that I didn’t have to actively protect her from the images on CNN. In fact, I barely saw them myself in those early post-K days because I was so preoccupied with trying to care for her and figure out where the hell we were going to go. And then when we got to my mother’s, she didn’t have cable. So I listened to NPR and read the Washington Post, two news outlets that sheltered us both from the hysteria.

Because my daughter is only two and a half, I haven’t had to do much explaining about the past. But I do have to explain what she sees all around her. Everywhere we go we see men repairing roofs or work crews with bulldozers collecting debris. I told her a few times that a big storm came through while we were gone and that now people have to fix the buildings and homes. When we were still in our apartment, we were living in the midst of a construction zone. The day we came home to the sound of men hacking away at the roof above our heads, she was terrified and clung to me like a baby gibbon, so I gathered her up and ran out of the building with debris falling all around us.

While we were still living in the apartment in Metairie, I spent all of our free time when she wasn’t in school looking for un-hurricane-touched areas of the city to take her. We looked for a safe playground that wasn’t shadowed by a burned-out house and that had safe swings and slides. I cringed as we drove past brick buildings that were half rubble, massive piles of debris, uprooted trees, or other obvious signs of destruction. I wasn’t sure how to name these things that she wanted to know about. “What’s that?” she would ask. And I would answer, “That house is broken. They need to fix that, don’t they?”

In a recent issue of her school’s newsletter, an article about helping kids through disasters advised parents to focus on signs of rebuilding and rebirth. The idea is to help kids see that things can be fixed—to make them feel that we have control over our environment, I guess, which helps them feel secure. It makes sense. It took me a while to make that turn away from despairing over the destruction towards seeing signs of hope and renewal. And I still go back and forth. But in the mind of a small child, who doesn’t yet understand the concept of destruction and death, rebirth is a given, once you point it out. We talk about the men laying bricks or fixing traffic lights or re-roofing houses. She wants to know where all the cars are going on the freeway and I tell her they are going to work or school. So many of them are pick-up trucks with ladders and other equipment or bucket trucks from the electrical company or furniture delivery trucks. So we talk about all of that too.

How much of the city’s incessant process of rebuilding is she aware of? It is looking like it’s going to take years. It will be part of the world she grows up in. I hope we can create a better world than the one the hurricane washed away.